2011 has been a year of significant changes for the Mono community. For the most part those changes have resulted in new development momentum. Today Mono startup Xamarin is announcing Mono for Android 4, providing support for Google's latest Android release.

Mono was originally started by Novell as an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET framework. After Novell was acquired by Attachmate, the lead mono developers, including project founder Miguel de Icaza, left to startup a company called Xamarin, which is focused on mobile development. In July, SUSE Linux partnered with Xamarin to provide support to Novell/SUSE customers.

As part of Xamarin, De Icaza noted that development is accelerating on Mono related efforts. One such effort is the MonoDevelop IDE, which forms part of the company's iPhone IDE. In recent months, the MonoDevelop open source project has moved to a more rapid release cycle where developers create their own development branches. Those branches are then merged with the mainline when ready, which enables new features to land faster.

"I am sick of having to wait 9 months to put new features into developers' hands," De Icaza said.

The MonoDevelop project is the first to benefit from the rapid release cycle. The next step is the core Mono project itself, which will soon move to the faster release cycle as well.

Overall, since Mono related efforts have moved to Xamarin, De Icaza said that more resources are being devoted to development.

"We're larger now than we were at Novell," De Icaza said. "We have teams that we didn't have at Novell like a full documentation team."